Perry Passed Common-sense Pro-life Law

August 25, 2011

As I’ve suggested before, people disagree about the morality of abortion, but we should at least all be able to agree that taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize it.

Earlier this year, Texas Governor Rick Perry signed a law ending government funding of abortion at the state and local levels in Texas. Reportedly this has left Planned Parenthood “reeling”, forced to close a number of clinics and reorganize its remaining operations in and around Texas.

24 Responses to “Perry Passed Common-sense Pro-life Law”

I support all of the provisions in Arizona’s abortion law, but I wonder, should a minor have to obtain her parents’ consent for an abortion if she is raped by her father? This could raise some prickly issues.

I completely agree. While we are talking about spending cuts, I think we should limit our military and cut all post enrollment benefits including pensions, medical services and all other government benefits. While my plan may be upsetting to some, it is very similar to the abortion argument. I for one am against post-service military benefits. I feel as a citizen who pays taxes, I should have a say in how my tax money is spent. While I recognize the need for an active military, I do not think we should be forced to assist those who served for the rest of their lives. Similar to how the government should not fund abortions for those who choose to have sex, we should not fund services after retirement for those who choose to serve. I see no difference. Murder is a sin; sex before marriage is a sin. If individuals choose to enroll in the military they are doing so at their own risk. If enrollment numbers drop and someone attacks us, I am proud to say I have multiple automatic weapons.

Right, so you’re pro-gun and pro-military, but you think military service equals murder? Nice try.

To the readers: “NRA for life” is actually a liberal atheist who has commented on this blog under various names before (and who does not have multiple automatic weapons). Other than that, I’ll leave it to you to take his comments for whatever they’re worth.

If Chillingworth is correct in his assertion you have avoided the brainwash that the majority of the world has falled victim to then good for you. Christianity is bullshit, and I piss on it. I piss on God too.

I just want the readers to know that this (“Mickey Mouse”) is the same Jon a third time.

Jon, like many atheists, you claim not to believe in God, and yet seem so hostile toward Him. Doesn’t that mean you already realize, somewhere inside, that He is real? Doesn’t that mean you should start thinking about what kind of relationship you want to have with your Creator? Think of any good thing you have, anything you’ve ever enjoyed in this world—that was because of Him; He made it. Shouldn’t you at least be grateful to Him?

Why does god have to be a “him”. Anyways, I really don’t believe, I am simply going for shock value. Like if I told someone I was going to kill their child and eat them; I may kill their child, but I doubt I would eat them. I suppose if god did exist I would consider pissing on him because if there is a god he should be held for war crimes.

Do you think a golden shower in heaven actually consists of a shower of gold?

Why would he be hostile toward God if he knew he were real? I don’t follow your logic.

Also, I’ve raised this point before but will raise it again. If, as you say, God is responsible for everything that is good, he is also responsible for everything that is bad. So as long as we’re grateful for the good things, don’t we have a right to be pissed off about the bad things? It’s only logical.

I still don’t understand why you keep linking back to that post. I made a number of serious arguments, and then ended the debate when I felt I had made my point. You do the same thing all the time. The reason you refuse to engage me on this subject is because you know I have the significant upper hand. Quit trying to act like there’s another reason, you’re insulting everyone’s intelligence.

You did make “a number of” arguments, partly because you changed the subject as you went. (It’s impossible to address the questions you raise if you always raise a new one before the previous discussion is complete.) You made it clear that you hadn’t even bothered to read the biblical texts that your whole argument relied on. You made a number of short, flippant, unthinking comments, provoking me and especially “historical critic” to take you seriously and give lengthy, thoughtful responses, engaging with the ideas and asking you follow-up questions. You responded by copping out of the conversation and declaring, incredibly, that the very length of Historical Critic’s answer indicated that you had won. You then acted as if you had never intended to have a serious discussion in the first place—it’s easy to switch back and forth between joking and being serious as one or the other seems more appealing to you in a given instant, and it’s a cop-out, and it makes it not worth it to take you seriously in the first place.

It’s easy for you to write your short, glib comments. It takes much longer to explain to you the many ways in which you’re wrong and relying on faulty assumptions. It’s not worth the time.

As I’ve said before, it’s also “often not clear whether you even want an answer, or only ask rhetorically, to assert your moral superiority and feel good about yourself, in which case an answer adds nothing.”

First, without government funding many abortion clinics will close. Many who want abortions will still find ways to obtain them. They will find back-alley doctors and complications will become increasingly more common. There will be botched abortions that will results in injury or death to the mother and other abortions that result in a failed abortion attempt causing the child to be disfigured.

My second concern is with government aid. Making abortion illegal will cut down on the number of abortions, but it will disproportionately affect the poor. Wealthy individuals will be able to travel to a state or another country to obtain abortions. Unfortunately they would be faced with what I outlined in #1. Individuals who cannot afford or locate other treatment opportunities will have no option but to have the child. While you can argue all you want that this was the mothers fault (i.e. having sex without facing the consequences), I hardly see how this is the child’s fault. So now we have a baby that the mother does not want, and we have cuts in government aid. What opportunities will this kid have? How many of these children will be successful compared to the number who end up in jail or end up pregnant with a child they want to abort. It will simply make increase the poverty in this country and start a downward spiral.

My third issue is with your view on abortion. You are a man, and therefore the right to an abortion does not extend to you. You have an argument that your tax dollars should not go to abortion and you have an abortion is murder argument. Unfortunately for you (and me), if your girlfriend/wife decided she wanted an abortion, you truly have no say (outside of persuasion). You and I can never understand what it would feel like giving up a child. It must be a horrible issue to confront. For this reasons you can argue all you want that you have a valid right as a taxpayer to fight against abortion but my point is simple: because we can never be pregnant and therefore we will never have to make the decision of whether or not to have an abortion, we cannot properly evaluate the right to abortion. I know you will rip this apart, but I truly feel it is unfair for a man to evaluate abortion rights when a man never has to deal with the fear of having to face an unplanned pregnancy.

I agree with you for the most part that abortion is primarily a women’s issue, though it does affect men to a certain extent. But, if men do not have standing to protest abortion, then straight people do not have standing to protest bans on gay marriage marriage, and so on and so on.

Ok, despite all of Chillingworth’s warnings about arguing with this “Legion” of commenters, I want to address Jon’s issues two and three.

—–The part of issue two that interests me might be summarized thus: even conceding that the woman is an agent who makes a choice to have sex or allow conception (for which her just reward is an unwanted child), the child has not chosen this and it is wrong to inflict upon this child an unloving or impoverished mother.

1. Would you kill someone for a crime he had no role in committing? As I see the dilemma, either the child lives or the child dies. If the child is killed, it is killed for the choices its mother made. Death seems a worse fate to me than life, and we don’t execute people for being victims of the agency of another individual.

2. You say poor women will be forced to carry to term their unwanted children. But were they forced to become pregnant in the first place? Mostly not. (The moral analysis is different when the pregnancy is not the result of any choices the mother makes.) I used to often park near a car with a bumper sticker that read “If you can’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?” But it gets everything embarrassingly backwards. She is INDEED trusted with a choice: a choice about whether to allow herself to become pregnant. That choice is real, with real consequences, for real other people. The ready availability of abortions virtually eliminates real choice, and the woman is just adrift in her own life, discouraged from thinking about the consequences of her choices. She is, I argue, quite disempowered. And the only “choice” she’s left with is in fact a choice she makes about the life and death of ANOTHER, not herself at all.

3. Motherhood is a big responsibility. But it starts before conception. A woman who aborts her child has been, arguably, a bad mother to that child. She killed it! It lost it’s life on her watch, when she had the ability to keep it alive. It’s not the child’s fault that it exists. It’s not the child’s fault that its mother feeds it a bad diet, or never teaches it not to bite people, or raises it to speak with bad grammar. We generally think it is OK to say a mother is responsible for feeding, teaching, and raising her child. Why not also for creating it?

—–Issue three, for the readers, was basically the argument that men are not entitled to opinions on abortion because they will never be faced with the question of whether to abort a child. I don’t care if Jon makes this argument seriously or in jest, because it is one I’ve heard others make seriously.

I’m not sure women are any more qualified to think about abortion than men. From conversations I’ve had with folks who work in abortion clinics, I’ve come to understand that the whole experience is often emotional, than girls and women are exposed to “counseling” with a heavy agenda, that those counselors think abortion is justified simply by a desire not to be inconvenienced by a child or by careerism among already accomplished and wealthy women. That young girls come in saying “I don’t believe in abortion; my coming here is just an extraordinary exception.” That those girls are accused of hypocrisy, but are actually manifesting indecision and emotional strife and a real, true belief that abortion is wrong. An abortion clinic employee told me those are the girls who will have the hardest time, psychologically, after an abortion. I heard someone testify that she felt the abortion culture had told her, effectively, that she didn’t have to think through the issue for herself, that she had an easy out from an undesirable situation and she shouldn’t worry about it.

In short: I’m not sure facing the situation affords anyone any clear-headedness about the issue. The waters are very muddied. The incentive systems are topsy-turvy. And, importantly, women also disagree about abortion.

By the way, what is the Post’s story, exactly? One of their witnesses “believes he saw it as recently as 2008.” Another “could not recall exactly when” the rock was turned over. “He said he did not know who turned the rock over.” The Perry campaign argues, “The one consistent fact in the story is that the word on a rock was painted over and obscured many years ago.”

But assume that it’s all accurate (and pretend it’s consistent). That still leaves a name that goes back way before the Perrys had any connection to the property, a name that was, like any name, idiomatic, that, according to the Post story, people thought of as simply the name of the place. This is also an attempt at guilt by association, and a tenuous association: As the Post puts it, “Perry was associated with the property through his father, partners or his signature on a lease.”

For further reading, if one were so inclined, I suggest this and this.

I am saying that it’s a much bigger issue that Barack Obama chose a rabid anti-American and anti-Semite as the spiritual leader for him and his family for twenty years, than that Rick Perry’s family has some connection with a ranch that once had a name which is now considered offensive language, a name which Perry unequivocally repudiates.